Uecker, Günther

Description:

Wendorf/Mecklenburg, 1930 - Düsseldorf, 2025
60 x 40 x 11 cm
"Feld", 1999. Nails and white paint on canvas, on wood. Signed, dated and titled in black paint on the reverse, with directional arrow.
Galerie Uwe Sacksofsky, Heidelberg.
Collection Monika and Horst Bülow, Leonberg, acquired there in 2005.
Günther Uecker was born in Wendorf in 1930 and came of age amid war, flight, and destruction. As a teenager in Mecklenburg at the end of the Second World War, he was forced, scarcely fifteen, to protect his mother and sister from assaults by Russian soldiers - improvising barricades of planks and nails. This existential experience - the nail as a tool of defense and protection - burned into his memory and formed the basis of his later art.
The nail became for Uecker a life symbol with a double meaning: a reminder of violence, threat, and injury, yet also of the possibility of security, order, and support. This ambivalence runs through his entire oeuvre.
From the late 1950s onward, Uecker made the nail the central medium of his art. Driving thousands of nails into canvas, wood, or everyday objects is more than a formal act; it is a bodily ritual that transforms biographical trauma into creation, rhythm, and energy.
In "Feld" (1999) this stance condenses into a vibrating pictorial landscape. Nails, hammered in dense currents, seem to pulse like magnetic fields or organic flows. The white paint that coats them transforms dark metal into a relief of light - the material’s hardness and menace transmuted into spiritual, peaceful energy.
Uecker understands the rhythmic hammering as a meditative act that leads memories of violence into a new order. Each blow is at once remembrance and surmounting, wounding and healing. Through serial repetition the individual nail becomes part of a larger field - an energetic space that transcends the personal and touches universal questions.
Uecker’s nail works count among the iconic positions of the ZERO movement, which he developed from 1958 with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack. ZERO sought a radical new beginning after the horrors of war - a "zero point" at which art no longer represents catastrophe but makes light, movement, and spirituality palpable.
"Feld" stands exemplarily for this ethos. It is a work nourished by the deepest biographical experience that simultaneously finds a universal, timeless language.
In "Feld" we encounter the essence of Uecker’s artistic thinking: the transformation of the nail - once a means of protecting his mother and sister in wartime - into an artistic medium that converts pain and violence into a vibrating field of light and energy.
Thus, the work becomes a monument to transcendence: born of biographical necessity, transformed into a universally resonant symbol of vulnerability, hope, and spiritual strength.